Destiny's Road by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page B

what Jemmy Bloocher had done to him. Blood flooded his vest. The fist-sized hole in his back- From time to time he woke and, with his eyes closed against the filtered light, thought how much he had lost.
    Somewhere around noon he ate half the speckle bread. It was his last speckles for the foreseeable future.
    What would satisfy the merchants? Just how badly did they want his
    blood? Would a face-saving gesture satisfy them? Or his exile? Or would they take reprisals against Bloocher Farm?
    Grow a beard or something. Lie about your age, many someone and move to another farm.
    They'd been pressed for time, trying to decide what to do now. Even so, Jemmy hadn't liked hearing that. Even if it worked, even if the merchants let it work... how was it better than just moving on down the Road? Either way, the man who had been Jemmy Bloocher was gone.
    Better, maybe, if he died here in the hills.
    Many forms of Destiny life were poisons. Hadn't that been trollhair, the last time he'd stopped at a stream? It was hair-fine silver stuff, soft looking threads with very sharp tips. He'd given those clumps a lot of room. Being scratched by trollhair was an easy death, a long slide into sleep.
    His family need never know. Jemmy never came to meet us.
    What had sent his thoughts straying toward suicide?
    Jemmy realized with a start that he was sleeping in the shade of a fool cage.
    There were fool cages growing among the manzanita, all around him. Four feet of trunk flared into a thorny oval cage of black wicker decorated with bronze and scarlet lace, and a few tiny bones in the cage.
    A Destiny bird could perch on any of a number of Destiny plants and find lace to eat. Some plants grew gaudy lace displays so that birds would transport their seeds. But the lace within a fool cage was a lure and a trap. A bird could perch on the upper branches of a fool cage, but any breeze that rattled the branches would cause them to trap a bird's feet, pull it in.
    Most Destiny birds had learned to stay away. These bones belonged to Earthlife.
    Curdis and Thonny and Brenda would expect to find him on the Road. Jemmy rolled his mattress, got his pack on, and crawled until the plants were thick enough to hide him walking upright.
    The water table was lower now: the plants reached no more than three hundred meters above the flatland and the Road. Jemmy traveled by night. By day there were plants to hide him. He slept away from water. A stream might make him a target.
    At night the star fields were gaudy, gorgeous. Quicksilver was brilliant but tiny and only showed for a few minutes after sunset. Kismet, Destiny's massive little moon, cast no more light even at the full. Any meteor might be Cavorite in reentry, or Argos among the asteroids, making a few seconds' burn. The land at night was black; a man could hurt himself thinking he saw more detail than was there.
    He could only glimpse the Road in patches, and the sea far beyond. Once he saw a boat moving parallel to shore. Once, a house or shed that looked abandoned. He hadn't yet seen a human being. Then again, he didn't intend to.
    There were Earthlife birds everywhere, a hundred varieties of song at morning and evening, hawks hovering on updrafts by day, owls hunting by night. He'd seen the shells and bones the predators had made of Destiny birds. And he'd seen fool cages everywhere, with Earthlife bones and beaks in them. The coming of Columbiad and Cavorite had been good for the fool cages.
    They were good for Jemmy. Any bird still flapping inside a fool cage must be fresh and edible. He found a smallish turkey on the second night, and he pulled on his thick gloves and reached in through the thorns and strangled it. After dawn he felt safe building a tiny fire in a circle of rocks. The perpetual wind was enough to whip the smoke away.
    On the third night he collected three little birds, pigeons maybe.
    At the fourth dawn he crossed above a waterfall, then crawled downhill into brush. The stream had cut a